Briefly Noted

Keynes, by Robert Skidelsky (PublicAffairs; $25.95). “Everyone is a Keynesian in the foxhole,” the economist Robert Lucas admitted earlier this year. Skidelsky’s book, supplementing his three-volume biography of the original macroeconomist, is an attempt to analyze the current financial mess as Keynes might have. The task is complicated by Keynes’s famous indifference to consistency. The core of his economic theory, Skidelsky insists, is a belief in genuine uncertainty, and a rejection of the fanciful mathematical models preferred by today’s young geniuses. He reminds us that Keynes was not only an economist but a cultural omnivore, a winning aphorist, and a sharp enough intellect to make Bertrand Russell feel “something of a fool” in his presence. If anything, Skidelsky oversells Keynes’s singular vitality, leaving one with the sinking feeling that his best ideas will never be resurrected without the man himself to propound them.

Beg, Borrow, Steal, by Michael Greenberg (Other; $19.95). Though he has lately found success with “Hurry Down Sunshine,” a memoir of his daughter’s mental breakdown, for decades Greenberg treated writing as a strictly part-time business. Binding together this episodic autobiography is the series of marginal jobs—mover, Bronx street vender, author of voice-over narration (“Golf. Simple. Majestic. Timeless”)—with which he supported his literary career. The book’s forty-four brief chapters originated as essays for the Times Literary Supplement, but they cohere well. Themes emerge by accretion, notably his family’s ambivalence about his work. His father, a scrap-metal dealer, asks, “Which do you think is worth more, a commodity or some goddamn idea?” The real attraction, however, is less family drama than the everyday texture of metropolitan life, which Greenberg captures with diaristic immediacy.

The Financial Lives of the Poets, By Jess Walter (Harper; 5.99). The protagonist of Walter’s first novel since the National Book Award finalist “The Zero” is a former financial journalist turned proprietor of poetfolio.com, an ill-conceived Web site featuring investment advice written in verse. Having gambled everything on this quixotic idea, he finds himself hobbled by debt and six days from losing his family home to a mortgage company. The only way out of his predicament, he decides, is to start dealing pot. The novel riffs (often in blank verse) on everything from balloon mortgages to thong-wearing suburban moms. Despite its unlikely conceit, the novel has warmth, and its protagonist emerges as a bourgeois Everyman of the downturn. Looking up at his “angular, two-story 1917 Tudor” house, he reflects, “I actually allowed myself to believe that a person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you.”

Blame, by Michelle Huneven (Sarah Crichton; $25). In the short first section of this elegant, hair-raising novel, Joey, a precocious twelve-year-old, gets her ears pierced by her uncle’s girlfriend, Patsy, who seems like a minor character until Part Two, when she wakes up in jail and her story takes over. Patsy is a blackout drunk, accused of having run over and killed a mother and daughter in the driveway of her house. In prison, where she works at a firefighting camp, she is forced to join A.A., and guilt drives her not only to make amends but to do good. Released and sober, she takes an apartment with no associations, returns to her job teaching history, marries, and is negotiating a sticky web of relationships, when Joey, now in her twenties, reappears, with disorienting information. Huneven’s prose is flawless, with especially arresting descriptions of the Southern California landscape, and her strong but fragile heroine is mercilessly honest.

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